


Permanent Placement

by Lacylu42



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-08
Packaged: 2018-02-16 15:34:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2275128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lacylu42/pseuds/Lacylu42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Memory is a very dangerous thing for Donna Noble, and Ianto Jones is called on to step in and help her. On Doctor's orders.</p><p>This fic "fixes" the events of Journey's End.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Permanent Placement

**Author's Note:**

> Pairing(s): none  
> Rating: PG for language  
> Warnings (if applicable): Spoilers through "Journey's End"; set between Journey's End and the events of Children of Earth.  
> Prompt: "Ianto, Donna and coffee"
> 
> Thanks to dogeared for the beta — and for not thinking I'm crazy. ;)
> 
> Originally written in August, 2008.

“So that’s it, really,” Ianto said, gesturing around at the sad racks of wilted brochures and pamphlets. “Do you have any questions?”  
  
“Yeah,” Donna Noble said, crossing her arms over her ample bosom. “Why are you offering me this job? I mean, shouldn’t it to go to — I dunno, someone  _Welsh_? This is the first time I’ve ever even been to Wales, innit. How am I supposed to run a tourist information center — at the bloody Millennium Centre?”  
  
“You come very highly recommended,” Ianto said smoothly. “I’m certain you’ll rise to the occasion. I was told you were the only person for the job.” Which was true. Mentioning that it was Dr. Martha Jones at UNIT who had done the recommending would only undermine the reason the woman was here.  
  
Donna turned to stare out the front windows at the Plass. It was spitting down rain, coloring the world a dull, soulless gray. “And that incredibly posh flat — that’s included? For just sitting here on my arse all day, doling out pamphlets?”  
  
“Government job,” Ianto replied. “Government perks.” Again, not entirely a lie. He’d chosen the flat himself, making certain it was nice enough to tempt, without being nice enough to raise too many questions.  
  
Donna snorted. She looked him up and down suspiciously. “You wouldn’t be  _expecting_  anything in exchange?”  
  
Ianto frowned slightly. “Well, we’d expect you to show up on time, do your work…”  
  
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t be  _expecting_  any more than that, right? Cos I don’t work like that, mate.” She stepped towards him, wagging her finger in his face. “I don’t  _do_  extracurriculars, if that’s what you’re  _expecting_. I'm not having any of that nonsense, sunshine, so–”  
  
“No,” Ianto said quickly, his eyes going wide as he cottoned on to what she was implying. “No. No. It’s all — strictly above board around here.” Well, that was a bald-faced lie, but she wasn’t to know about any of the other business anyway.  
  
“Hmph,” she said, looking around the shop appraisingly once more. “Then I reckon you’ve got yourself a receptionist.” She spun around and shot him a brilliant smile. “Welcome to Cardiff.”  
  
He relaxed and smiled back.  
  
~*~  
  
“Can I get you a coffee?”  
  
Donna looked up from the stacks of brochures balanced in her lap. She’d been sorting and organizing all week, pulling the outdated materials — there were pamphlets from 1987 in some of these racks — because there was nothing much else to do. Very few actual tourists found this particular tourist information center. Mostly she accepted the pizzas that were delivered for the rest of the staff downstairs.  
  
But this was what she was good at: she filed. She organized. She created logic out of chaos.  
  
She smiled skeptically up at Ianto. “Nobody gets the temp a coffee.”  
  
He tilted his head at her with a puzzled look. “You’re not a temp.”  
  
Donna blinked. “No,” she said slowly. “No, of course not. I just–” She stopped and shook her head. “Blimey, I’ve got mad déjà vu…”  
  
Ianto’s smile faltered a little bit, but he just asked, “Cream and sugar?”  
  
Downstairs, it didn’t take him long to locate the offending memory in her dossier. He chastised himself silently for the gaffe as he mixed three sugars and a little white pill into the steaming cup of coffee.  
  
~*~  
  
Three weeks later, Donna had taken to bringing a cheap paperback to work with her every day, usually a romance, and Ianto had figured out exactly the right dosage to handle most of the minor memories that cropped up. One didn’t want to use too little or too much.  
  
He’d sought Jack’s advice at first, but Jack wanted nothing to do with it. “I know what it’s like to be left behind,” he had said. “But I'm off limits. I can’t help her.”  
  
Ianto had realized then that Jack didn’t approve. Martha had asked and Jack had agreed, because it was Martha, and because that’s what Jack was good at: never leaving a comrade behind. But Jack was only following orders: bringing Donna to Cardiff, taking her away from the life in Chiswick that was full of mistakes and slip-ups and accidental remembrances, any one of which might kill her.  
  
Jack knew he was a danger to Donna, and it hurt him. He was potentially another of those treacherous memories. Gwen and Ianto were relatively safe — barely more than a blip on a vid screen, hardly enough to burn into memory. Unfortunately, Gwen was a rubbish actress and couldn’t tell a lie to save her life.  
  
But they all knew that Ianto could lie when he needed to.  
  
So Ianto took over with Donna. Because that was what  _he_  was good at: taking over the jobs no one else wanted. He didn't understand what had happened to her, really. The file he'd been given merely said that she'd lost some of her memories, any of which, returned to her, could cause her great pain, even death.  
  
Jack mentioned something about her sharing her mind with the Doctor. But she didn't seem much like the Doctor to Ianto. He rather thought a Time Lord would be less obsessed with celebrity gossip, for one.  
  
“Who’s that man?” Donna asked suddenly, nearly knocking him over in her hurry to get to the window. Ianto scowled at the coffee sloshed on his tray before he looked up and caught a flutter of Jack’s greatcoat as he made his way toward the lift.  
  
“I've seen him all the time, these last few weeks,” Donna said, peering avidly out into the otherwise quiet Plass. "He's bloody gorgeous."  
  
“Oh, that’s Mr. Harkness,” Ianto said, carefully nonchalant. “He works somewhere around here.”  
  
“Harkness…” Donna repeated. “It’s not… It’s not  _Jack_  Harkness, is it? Cor, where do I know that name? Is he on telly? He seems sort of familiar, but sort of…” She squinted, shaking her head. “Sort of… wrong?”  
  
Ianto almost did not make it out from behind the counter in time to catch her as she fell.  
  
~*~  
  
“Oi!” Donna grumbled, blinking up at him. “What the hell are you doing in my bedroom?”  
  
“That’s thanks for you.” Ianto spared her a patient look as he set the tray he was carrying on her bedside table. “You’re feeling well enough to shout at me; that's something at least.”  
  
“What?”  
  
Ianto brushed aside her fringe and pressed the back of his hand to her cool forehead. “I think your fever is breaking.”  
  
“Fever?”  
  
“You’ve only been ill for the last three days,” Ianto said, sitting in the chair he’d pulled up to the side of her bed. “And with nothing in except a packet of Hobnobs. Honestly, how do you live?”  
  
She shook her head, groggily. “How did you get in?” she asked.  
  
Ianto reached into his pocket and pulled out a key on a Justin Timberlake keychain. “You gave it to me weeks ago. Don’t you remember?”  
  
“Why would I—”  
  
“You said if I was going to spend every other night on your sofa after we got pissed down the pub, I ought to have a key so I didn’t wake you up coming and going.”  
  
“We’re… mates?” Donna said.  
  
He frowned, a carefully constructed look of concern. “Ok, that’s not funny.”  
  
She smiled weakly. “No, of course we are. I gave you that key. With the stupid key fob. Because it was funny and I knew you’d hate it.”  
  
Ianto smiled, genuinely relaxing. Sometimes it was frightening, really, how easy it was.  
  
~*~  
  
It wasn’t hard to be Donna’s friend. And it certainly made keeping an eye on her that much easier. He hadn’t really warmed to her at first; she was brash and loud where he was quiet and composed. She focused on the minutiae of pop culture and he barely had time for it, let alone an inclination to memorize who was dating whom. But it turned out they had quite a bit in common. She thought he was funny and he liked to see her laugh.  
  
He pretended not to notice the dark looks Jack sometimes gave him when he came back from an ever-more-frequent chat and a coffee upstairs.  
  
“Speaking of dreams,” Donna said one evening, as they were carrying take-away curries back to the office, “I had the barmiest dream you ever heard last night.”  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“Yeah! I was on the M-25 in a taxi, going a million miles an hour, and Father Christmas was the driver. But I was terrified of him! Terrified of Father Christmas. Anyway, I knew I had to get out of the taxi, so I opened the door — right in the middle of the M-25, mind — and I was going to jump out. But then—” she bumped him with her shoulder, “this is the best bit, right? I realize: I’m wearing a  _wedding dress_. And that’s the bit that stops me. Not the fact that I would be ripped to smithereens on the tarmac, but that I’m wearing a bloody wedding dress!”  
  
She tilted her head back and laughed and Ianto smiled through clenched teeth, his stomach gripping painfully. He had grown to dread the inevitable consequences of her fickle memories: the confusion, the sudden headache, the fainting, or worst, the terrible fevers. But Donna just shook her head, still laughing.  
  
“Bonkers, right? Anyway, in the dream, I was convinced — utterly convinced — that if I jumped, someone would catch me. Someone would be there, right? But there wasn’t.” She paused, a small frown creasing her forehead. “There wasn’t anyone there, in the end.”  
  
Ianto did not know what to say to that.  
  
“I dunno,” she said, after taking a long breath. “I mean. Leave it to my crazy head to dream up something like that. What do you think it means?”  
  
“It means you’re afraid you’ll never meet a man, you daft cow,” Ianto said, opening the door for her. “What else could it mean?”  
  
Donna made a face at him. “What do I need a man for? I've got you.”  
  
~*~  
  
The dreams started to come more frequently, and Ianto kept detailed notes of them all, diligently, in Donna’s file. She seemed to be dreaming more or less in chronological order, as far as he could tell.  
  
The dreams of Pompeii prompted her to rent  _Rome_ , which they watched together at her flat on the new TV she'd bought with the ridiculous wages he paid her. The dreams of what she called the squid people set her to crying when she tried to explain why they were so sad. And when she dreamed of a giant wasp, she switched her paperbacks from romances to mysteries.  
  
He thought he could match most of the dreams up with the events outlined in her dossier, but she never mentioned the Doctor. Not directly, at least. She often mentioned that she was waiting for someone, or expecting someone, especially expecting someone to save her. But he never showed up.  
  
He didn’t save her.  
  
The entire time, Ianto worried about the moment when it would all catch up with her. He even consulted with Martha about what he should do, should the unthinkable happen. He had a cryo chamber all prepped and ready — waiting almost directly below the desk where Donna sat, day in and day out, in the tourist office above.  
  
But it never happened. Something had changed. In his reports, Ianto postulated that somehow she could process the memories better as dreams. Perhaps they weren’t real enough to her to be a threat.  
  
Or so he thought until he was woken one stormy autumn night by a frantic banging on his door. Warily, he peered through the peephole, but quickly clicked the safety back on his gun and slid it into a coat pocket at the sight of her. The icy fingers of worry prickled at his spine; something was definitely wrong if she’d rung the bell instead of just letting herself in. Her thick ginger hair was plastered to her head, making her look smaller somehow.  
  
“You look like a drowned rat,” he exclaimed, throwing open the door and beckoning her in. “What are you doing out there?”  
  
Her eyes were wide and wild, like a cornered animal. He had never seen her look so afraid. He wrapped an arm around her, trying to take her coat, but she buried her face in his shoulder, and he felt the frigid damp of her rain-soaked head through his tee-shirt. “What’s the matter, love?” he said, pulling her into a hug. “Another nightmare?  
  
“Ianto,” she whispered. “Help me, please.”  
  
“What? What is it?” he demanded. Her silence frightened him as much as anything. “Donna, tell me!”  
  
“There’s something on my back!”  
  
~*~  
  
The next few weeks were nothing but nightmares. Screaming grief and blind, utter terror. He moved into the spare room in her flat to be close by. He offered her leave from the tourist office and spent as little time at the Hub as he could manage.  
  
“She needs me,” he told Jack and accepted the conflicted look he received as permission.  
  
He vacillated over the idea of sedatives, but some intuition told him that the memories needed to come out. Drugs would only prolong the process.  
  
She relived everything, recounting it to him in confused bursts, searching for words to describe the wonders and horrors she’d seen — ghosts in the darkness, entire lives that weren't real, war and death and terrible monsters that masqueraded as human beings. There were things he could barely imagine — and he'd never thought of himself as lacking imagination.  
  
Eventually the disjointed stories became eerily familiar. He nearly ripped the arm off his chair when she said, “And you were there,” one sunny morning. But even that didn’t trigger one of her fits.  
  
As he recorded the latest dream that afternoon in the Hub, he realized it had been nearly six weeks since she’d had even the tiniest dose of retcon, and he wondered the thing none of them had even dared to wonder.  
  
He wondered if Donna Noble was getting better.  
  
~*~  
  
And then the dreams stopped. Donna was, of course, relieved, and took a holiday to see her family. Ianto couldn’t think of a good reason why she shouldn’t, but he fretted all the same as he drove her to the train station. Her mother and grandfather knew the rules, he reminded himself. The Doctor himself had told them what was at stake. They would keep her safe.  
  
He called and made sure Mrs. Noble had his mobile. Just in case.  
  
While Donna was away, he worked. There was endless paperwork to be filed, artifacts to be catalogued, and the odd apocalypse to avert, but when he found a moment, he went back to Donna’s file. Carefully, painstakingly, he worked through the disjointed symbols of the dreams, matching them up with events in the dossier.  
  
Late one night, working alone at his desk in the hub, he wondered who had written the dossier. He wondered why he hadn’t wondered about it before.  
  
It couldn’t have been Jack or Martha. There were things in there they couldn’t have known, and he rather thought he would have recognized their voices — Jack’s especially — in the reports. He flipped through the pages until he found a particular line that had tripped him up several times before.  
  
 _"The cyanide poisoning was counteracted by a stimulation of the inhibited enzymes into reversal through a mixture of organic, inorganic and environmental stimuli._  
  
Martha would never have said it like that. Jack wouldn’t have known how. Ianto set down his pen and rested his hand on the page. This file — this dossier so painstakingly compiled, so detailed and correct — these were the orders sent down not from Dr. Jones at UNIT, but from  _the_  Doctor. The Doctor himself had written this about his friend, his companion, to protect her.  
  
To save her.  
  
Ianto looked up sharply and stared off into the dark. He thought he heard a noise from somewhere inside the hub.  
  
~*~  
  
"When do you think you'll be back? I can get you from the train."  
  
"I don't know. You… I understand if you can't hold my job for me."  
  
"Don't be daft."  
  
"Thanks. It's a bit nice being home. My mum's not being at all herself — she hasn't told me off once. I kept asking if she was ill, at first. We took a holiday to this little hotel out in the country, the three of us."  
  
"Oh yeah?"  
  
"Yeah. And I remembered being there before. At Christmas. Only, Mum and Granddad didn't remember it at all."  
  
"Well, they're getting on–"  
  
"And then I remembered — there was a terrible crash. Or an explosion…"  
  
"…From your dream, you mean."  
  
There was a long pause on the other end of the line — so long, he thought he might have lost the call.  
  
"Yeah," she said at last. "From my dream."  
  
~*~  
  
“Ianto,” Donna said as he closed up the tourist office one night, a few days after she returned from Chiswick. “I have something to tell you. Something important.”  
  
“I’m all ears,” Ianto said, turning to her. Her arms were crossed, hugging herself, and her expression was oddly serious. “Everything alright?” he asked.  
  
“You tell me.” Donna walked across the Plass with Ianto following until she stopped and pointed at a spot directly in front of the fountain.  
  
“There’s a perception filter there,” she said matter-of-factly. “It causes a ripple in people’s perception field so they don’t notice what’s there.” Ianto stared at her. "It's like when you fancy someone, and they don't know you exist." She grasped her hands together and started to look a little bit desperate. “I’m pretty sure it was caused by a long exposure to a chameleon circuit. The effects of the chameleon circuit sort of rubbed off on the pavement right there. Or…” Her face crumpled like she was trying not to cry. “Not the pavement. That’s not right. It rubbed off on reality itself. Right there. In that spot.”  
  
Ianto realized that his mouth was hanging open and snapped it shut.  
  
“Am I mad?” Donna cried. “I’m going out of my mind! First those awful bloody dreams and now — now.” She put her face in her hands, her words coming out muffled from beneath them. “Now, it’s like I just  _know_  things. Things I couldn’t possibly know.” She dropped her hands again and stared at her feet. “Impossible things. Things I couldn’t prove even if they were true. Sometimes words come out and they have a strange taste. They aren't my words at all.  
  
“I just don’t even  _know_  any more! What’s real? What’s a dream? It started happening after that holiday. I knew I’d been to that posh hotel, and I knew about the crash, and about all the horrible things that happened after.” She shuddered and Ianto moved forward to put a hand on her arm. “And then it all just came pouring out, like some sort of dam had burst. I nearly gave my granddad fits talking about the physics of fusion and intergalactic distances and the temperature of the sun when we were just out looking at the stars.” She inhaled a deep, gasping breath.  
  
“And I think you knew,” she said, looking up at him at last. Ianto opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Should he deny it? Could he? “That’s the only explanation,” she continued. “You knew what was really going on and so you knew I wasn’t going mad with all those dreams. I mean —  _I_  thought I was going mad, but you kept calmly telling me it was my brain working things out, because you knew that’s what it was doing.”  
  
Ianto sighed. “I didn’t know for sure,” he said at last. “I could only hope.”  
  
Donna frowned and stepped away from him, yanking her arm from his grasp. “What else do you know?” she asked, and his heart nearly broke at the betrayal in her voice. “What else aren’t you telling me?”  
  
“I know that there is a perception filter there,” Ianto said, gesturing to the spot in front of the fountain. “And I know I didn't understand half of the rest of the stuff you said, but I also know you're not mad.” He reached for her hand. “And I know that, whatever’s going on, we can figure it out. Together.”  
  
Donna stared at him for a long, cold moment before she took his hand.  
  
~*~  
  
"Ianto!"  
  
"It's alright, Jack."  
  
"Are you out of your bloody mind?" Gwen shouted. "You can't bring her down here! You're going to hurt her."  
  
"It's not safe — she's not safe!"  
  
"Oi!" Donna shouted, scowling at Jack and Gwen. "And she's standing right here, en't she?"  
  
Jack stared at her. "Apparently so," he said. He watched as Ianto guided Donna off the lift. "What's going on?"  
  
"Well, you're being rude, for starters," Ianto said.  
  
Jack gave him a curious look, but turned to Donna with a smile that would melt concrete. "Captain Jack Harkness," he said, extending his hand.  
  
Donna grasped it, her scowl softening into flattered pleasure.  
  
"Well! You're just delicious, aren't you? You're just… Just…" Her face screwed up into an expression of confusion and horror. "Just  _wrong_. Good god. What's wrong with you?"  
  
"OK, that's never happened before," Jack said, releasing her hand.  
  
"You're a fixed point in time and space," Donna said, taking a step backwards and bumping into Ianto. Her eyes never left Jack's face. "You're a  _fact_."  
  
"What does that mean?" Gwen asked. Ianto raised his eyebrows, indicating he didn't know.  
  
"Donna?" Jack said, coming towards her slowly. "Donna… do you remember?"  
  
Donna blinked at him. "How do you know my name?"  
  
Ianto stepped between them. "She knows things, but she doesn't know how she knows them," he said to Jack. "And I think it's time for us to fill in a few blanks."  
  
Jack nodded slowly. "Gwen, will you show Donna to the conference room?"  
  
"How about a cup of tea?" Ianto asked, as Gwen ushered Donna past.  
  
"Yeah, that'd be lovely." Donna turned suddenly, shooting him a look over her shoulder. "Hold the retcon, if you please."  
  
~*~  
  
After weeks of late nights in the hub, jumping at every sound, Ianto was finally rewarded with an uneasily familiar vworp vworp sound that echoed up from the floors below. He made a stop in the kitchen before heading back to his own desk.  
  
A tall, lanky man in a brown suit was sitting in his chair, bent over, studying something intently.  
  
“Good evening, Doctor.”  
  
The Doctor looked up, startled. “Blimey! Thought I was the only one here. You scared the life out of me. One of my hearts nearly stopped.” Donna's file was spread out in front of him across the otherwise clutter-free surface.  
  
“Can I offer you a cup of tea?” Ianto asked mildly, bringing in the tray he had carefully prepared. He set it on the edge of the desk and poured a cup. The Doctor reached for it, but Ianto circumvented him, adding one sugar and just enough milk to muddy the waters. He passed the cup as the Doctor gave him an appraising look.  
  
“Tea boy’s intuition?”  
  
“Martha Jones, actually.”  
  
The Doctor smiled slyly. “Quite right. You’re a lot more than a tea boy, aren’t you Ianto Jones?” He closed the file on the desk carefully.  
  
Ianto chose not to answer what was clearly a rhetorical question. He slid into the chair opposite his own desk. “Did you know it would be me, sir?” he asked.  
  
“You what?”  
  
“You wrote the file. You sent Martha looking for her. Did you know I would be the one to take care of her here?”  
  
“Oh, no. We-ell. No.” He leaned back in the chair and peered at Ianto over the tops of his spectacles. “But I suspected it might be.”  
  
“You've read my notes. Do you think she's cured?”  
  
The Doctor sat up again, no longer meeting Ianto’s gaze. “No. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." He stood and started pacing. “Her mind can’t cope with everything at once, so it’s built barriers, safe zones. Thanks to you. You kept her alive long enough for the brain to repair itself." He stopped and waggled his finger at Ianto — a gesture that reminded him eerily of his first meeting with Donna. “The human brain is an amazing thing — never let anyone try and tell you different.”  
  
“But she’s part Time Lord again, sir,” Ianto said. “She knows things–“  
  
The Doctor made a face. “Oh, don’t start calling me sir. Her brain has decided it’s better for everyone involved if she remembers some things. Which is good, really, because who knows what all that retcon was doing to her system. So she remembers bits and pieces, mostly without a context. It’s like…" He snapped his fingers several times, obviously trying to think of what it was like. "It’s like… It’s like the word it.” He stopped and leaned on the desk, his long legs splayed out behind him almost comically. “You know the meaning of the word it, you use it a thousand times every day. But if someone asked you how you knew it, where you learned it, you wouldn’t remember. You were probably never taught the definition of the word it — it just worked its way into your vocabulary.” He paused and grinned at himself. “ _It_  worked  _its_  way…” he said absently.  
  
“So she knows things, but she doesn’t know how she knows them.”  
  
“That’s what I said. Isn’t that what I said?”  
  
“That’s what she said,” Ianto countered. “And it made a lot more sense when she said it. Is she out of danger, at least?”  
  
The smile slipped off the Doctor’s face. “There’s still a danger,” he said.  
  
“What?” Ianto pressed. He had to know. This was Donna, and he would do whatever it took to protect her. "What is it?"  
  
“Me,” the Doctor said, matter-of-factly. “I reckon I'm the missing link. If she remembered me, she would remember it all. All of it, all at once.” He raised his chin and stared off across the hub. “Her brain wouldn’t be able to control it any more. She would be back where she began, and less likely to survive.” He stopped and brought his focus back to Ianto. “She can never know about me.”  
  
“She already does,” Ianto said.  
  
“ _What_?” The Doctor’s tone was harsh and angry.  
  
“She figured it out,” Ianto said. “But she doesn’t remember you exactly. She calls you ‘the ghost’ in her dreams.”  
  
The Doctor sat heavily in Ianto’s chair. “Clever girl,” he said softly. “She must have realized there was something else, something out of bounds.” He glanced up at Ianto. “She must have asked you to help keep her from it.” He raised his eyebrows. "That's why you were waiting for me."  
  
Ianto nodded in confirmation.  
  
The Doctor stood up suddenly and held his hand out. Ianto rose and shook it.  
  
“Good work, Ianto Jones. You did what I couldn’t.” Ianto saw the stiffness in the Doctor’s shoulders as he turned for the door.  
  
"Will you be checking my work often, then, sir?" Ianto asked.  
  
The Doctor hesitated. "I was just looking up an old friend," he said at last. He glanced over his shoulder, his eyes meeting Ianto’s. "I won't be back."  
  
"No, sir," Ianto said, beginning to gather the tea things onto his tray. "I should think not."  
  
  
~*~  
  
“Oh. My. God.”  
  
Donna stared around the cluttered room on one of the lower levels of the hub that served as overflow storage for some of the less dangerous alien artifacts. She had taken the Pterodactyl and the weevils in stride, but this room seemed to throw her. Ianto looked around at the random assortment of weird objects and nodded.  
  
“I know. It's pretty amazing–“  
  
“You call this  _filing_? What is this? This is only a Zygon molecular disperser sitting in a Nestene nursery cot. I thought you were meant to be this superhuman office boy or something.” She picked up a long, cylindrical object that strongly resembled a piece of lead piping and waved it in his face. “Do you even  _know_  what this is?”  
  
“Er… A lead pipe?”  
  
Donna glanced at it. “Well, yes. But that’s exactly the point! What the bleeding hell is it doing down here with the rest of this mess?”  
  
By the time Jack wandered down to see where they’d got to, Donna was hip deep in a box of what they’d all assumed was scrap metal — though obviously not of Earthly origins — alternately swearing colorfully and making interested noises as she sorted through the bits and pieces.  
  
“How’s the tour going?” Jack asked, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, an amused expression playing across his face.  
  
“I think she’s in her element,” Ianto replied.  
  
“What, in the rubbish bin?”  
  
“Oi! Watch it, pretty boy. I heard that.”  
  
“Planning to stay, then?” Jack asked, utterly nonplussed.  
  
Donna climbed out of the box and made her way toward them. “Clearly,” she said in her bossiest tone, “you lot need me. Desperately. How you’ve managed to get on this long without me is anyone’s guess.”  
  
“Clearly,” Jack agreed, grinning.  
  
Donna held up her fingers, ticking off her demands. “I’ll need my own workspace — in the hub, not up in the bloody tourist office, because I’m not hiking up and down four flights of stairs every other minute — access to the computers, some good database software, and a ten percent pay rise.”  
  
“Ten percent!”  
  
“Hazard pay,” Donna said. “This — so-called — file system is going to be a hazard to my sanity.” Jack threw his head back and laughed as Donna fixed Ianto with a serious glare. “Honestly. What were you  _thinking_?”  
  
“Agreed,” Jack said at last. “I’ll want regular reports about anything useful or dangerous you come across.”  
  
Donna smiled lasciviously and gave him a salute. “Aye-aye, Captain.  _Regular_  reports.”  
  
“Sexual harassment is not tolerated at Torchwood,” Jack said without even a hint of irony.  
  
“Unless he’s the one doing it,” Donna said elbowing Ianto in the ribs.  
  
“Precisely,” Ianto agreed.  
  
“What have I done?” Jack wondered aloud as he turned to leave. Ianto caught his arm.  
  
“Thank you,” he said softly.  
  
“What can I say?” Jack said, patting his hand. “Apparently we need a full-time part-Time-Lord filing clerk.”  
  
“Too right, you do,” Donna scoffed.  
  
~*~  
  
“God, what a mess.”  
  
“It’s not that bad.”  
  
“How would you even know? You wouldn’t know a piece of Kroton armour if it bit you on the arse.”  
  
“But you do.”  
  
“Course I do. Thanks to you, I suppose. Might as well put this head thing of mine to some use. Super temp to the rescue!”  
  
Ianto leaned over and bumped his shoulder against hers. “You’re not a temp, anymore. I’m afraid Torchwood is rather permanent.”  
  
“Permanent placement.” Donna smiled up at him. “I think I’ll like that.”  
  
They leaned against one another in silence for a long minute.  
  
“You’re still super, though.”  
  
“Cor, way to ruin the moment. Sap alert!”  
  
“Shut up.”  
  
“Oi. Watch it.”


End file.
